Abstract
Advances in soft robotics will be crucial to the next generation of robot-human interfaces. Soft material systems embed safety at the material level, providing additional safeguards that will expedite their placement alongside humans and other biological systems. However, in order to function in unpredictable, uncontrolled environments alongside biological systems, soft robotic systems should be as robust in their ability to recover from damage as their biological counterparts. There exists a great deal of work on self-healing materials, particularly polymeric and elastomeric materials that can self-heal through a wide variety of tools and techniques. Fortunately, most emerging soft robotic systems are constructed from polymeric or elastomeric materials, so this work can be of immediate benefit to the soft robotics community. Though the field of soft robotics is still nascent as a whole, self-healing and damage resilient systems are beginning to be incorporated into three key support pillars that are enabling the future of soft robotics: actuators, structures, and sensors. This article reviews the state-of-the-art in damage resilience and self-healing materials and devices as applied to these three pillars. This review also discusses future applications for soft robots that incorporate self-healing capabilities.
Highlights
Soft robots are often inspired by key aspects of biological systems, such as their near-infinite degrees of freedom, dexterity, environmental adaptability, and power output (Kim et al, 2013; Rus and Tolley, 2015; Balasubramanian et al, 2016)
In order to be commercially viable for everyday use in these applications, soft robots should be robust enough to function alongside their self-healing, damage resilient biological companions (Bauer et al, 2014)
Liu et al used room-temperature liquid metals to create a highly deformable thin-film fluidic electrode for a Dielectric Elastomer Actuators (DEAs) (Liu et al, 2013)
Summary
Soft robots are often inspired by key aspects of biological systems, such as their near-infinite degrees of freedom, dexterity, environmental adaptability, and power output (Kim et al, 2013; Rus and Tolley, 2015; Balasubramanian et al, 2016). The thin nature of DEAs makes them susceptible to defects from physical damage and manufacturing imperfections These defects are often undetectable until the electric potential is applied (Zurlo et al, 2016), and they can create a continuous conductive bridge or a sudden spark between the electrodes, effectively ending the life of the actuator. The researchers made a flexible, stretchable electrode from spray-coated single-walled carbon nanotubes (CNTs) that degrades locally around any spark caused by dielectric breakdown, outside sources of electricity, or physical piercing This degradation breaks the local continuity, and conductivity, of the electrode, preventing further loss of energy through the damaged area, though locally increasing the stiffness of the electrode. Another research group led by Dr Dorina Opris has investigated damage resilient DEAs, altering both the electrode
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